A peer-reviewed open-access journal

ZooKeys 209: 93–102 (2012)

Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens... 93
doi: 10.3897/zookeys.209.3121 Research article
www.zookeys.org Launched to accelerate biodiversity research

Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation

of herbarium specimens using a modular
and scalable approach

Elspeth Haston1, Robert Cubey1, Martin Pullan­­1, Hannah Atkins1, David J Harris1

1 Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 20a Inverleith Row, Edinburgh, EH3 5LR, UK

Corresponding author: Elspeth Haston (e.haston@rbge.org.uk)

Academic editor: V Blagoderov  |  Received 23 March 2012  |  Accepted 13 July 2012  |  Published 20 July 2012

Citation: Haston­­E, Cubey­­R, Pullan­­M, Atkins H, Harris DJ (2012) Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation
of herbarium specimens using a modular and scalable approach. In: Blagoderov V, Smith VS (Ed) No specimen left
behind: mass digitization of natural history collections. ZooKeys 209: 93–102. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.209.3121

Abstract
Digitisation programmes in many institutes frequently involve disparate and irregular funding, diverse
selection criteria and scope, with different members of staff managing and operating the processes. These
factors have influenced the decision at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to develop an integrated
workflow for the digitisation of herbarium specimens which is modular and scalable to enable a single
overall workflow to be used for all digitisation projects. This integrated workflow is comprised of three
principal elements: a specimen workflow, a data workflow and an image workflow.
The specimen workflow is strongly linked to curatorial processes which will impact on the prioritisa-
tion, selection and preparation of the specimens. The importance of including a conservation element
within the digitisation workflow is highlighted. The data workflow includes the concept of three main
categories of collection data: label data, curatorial data and supplementary data. It is shown that each
category of data has its own properties which influence the timing of data capture within the workflow.
Development of software has been carried out for the rapid capture of curatorial data, and optical char-
acter recognition (OCR) software is being used to increase the efficiency of capturing label data and
supplementary data. The large number and size of the images has necessitated the inclusion of automated
systems within the image workflow.

Keywords
Large-scale digitisation, curation, data entry, image capture

Copyright Elspeth Haston et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0
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94 Elspeth Haston et al. / ZooKeys 209: 93–102 (2012)

Introduction
The need for the digitisation of biological collections is widely recognised (eg European
Commission 2011, Kroes 2011, Niggeman et al. 2011) resulting in the development
of national digitisation strategies (eg Beach et al. 2010). The challenges of digitising
natural history specimens have been explored (eg Beaman et al. 2007, Vollmar et al.
2010) and there have been several studies investigating data capture methods (Beaman
et al. 2006, Heidorn and Wei 2008, Best et al. 2009, Lafferty and Landrum 2009,
Granzow-de la Cerda and Beach 2010, Haston et al. 2012). Within this context of
large scale digitisation of natural history collections, there is a need for the development
of digitisation workflows to manage each of the elements of the digitisation process.
In developing workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens there are
many factors which will influence the decisions made. Whilst it is clear that the fi-
nancial costs of a digitisation programme may significantly limit the options available
for equipment, software, staffing and storage, there are also other factors to consider.
The funding itself may be irregular and be used for a range of diverse projects. Each
institute has their own priorities and constraints and in the larger institutes there may
be a range of digitisation programmes each with a different focus but which need to be
integrated in some way. The recommendation of following a demand-driven digitisa-
tion model (Berendsohn and Seltmann 2010, Berendsohn et al. 2010, Berents et al.
2010) may result in an increase in the diversity of material being prioritised which will
have an impact on the efficiency of the workflow. The concept of scalability is a factor
which takes into account the potential increase in funding and resources. In addition,
the integration of digitisation workflows into the core curation activities may play a
large part in the decision-making process.
At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), we have aimed to develop
workflows which incorporate automated systems to enable us to expand and speed up
the digitisation process. However, given the irregular nature of much of the funding
available for digitisation, we have also based the digitisation workflows on a modular
system which has the potential to be scaled up as funding becomes available. Addi-
tional modules may be added as they are developed, including a georeferencing tool
(Llewellyn 2011) and additional quality control elements. A key factor in developing
the workflow has been the need to continue to manage the images and data after cap-
ture. This is a very significant addition to the workload for herbarium staff and there is
a requirement for this aspect of the workflow to be as efficient and simple as possible,
with the aim of helping curators in the future to manage the collections.
Where possible, the digitisation workflow aims to use shared standards and for-
mats. The adoption of standards allows easier transfer and sharing of data and is recog-
nised as being of high importance in digitisation strategies (eg Beach et al. 2010). All
data are routinely submitted to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF),
images are available on Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), a proportion of images and data
are submitted to JSTOR and we are working on processes for submitting images and
data to the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) and Europeana.
 Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens... 95

Workflows and processes

The integrated digitisation workflow at RBGE has been developed over the last four
years, during which time it has evolved into the present system. Over this period
large digitisation projects have been undertaken wholly within this system, whilst
other projects have gradually been incorporated. All digitisation is now undertaken
within this integrated system and there are currently 160,000 specimens digitised
and available online (www.rbge.org.uk). Whilst increasing the rate of digitisation
has been a contributing factor in the development of workflows, the need for man-
aging the data, images and processes has been the most important driver for the
development of this integrated system.
There are three primary workflows within the digitisation programme (Fig. 1). The
specimen workflow involves the physical movement and preparation of the specimens
and folders. The data workflow focuses on the capture and management of specimen
data (included within a broad “metadata” concept by Berendsohn et al. (2010)). Final-
ly the image workflow focuses on the capture and management of images and related
image management data including the equipment, operator and file location. These
workflows and the interactions between them are described here.

The specimen workflow

In this context, the specimen workflow involves the physical selection and movement
of specimens within the digitisation process as well as the preparation of the specimens
and folders. This is closely linked with existing specimen workflows for loans, incom-
ing specimens, destructive sampling, curation etc.
See the Specimen workflow in Figure 1.
The selection of the specimens is dependent on the outcome of the prioritisa-
tion procedure. The specimen workflow developed at RBGE predominantly fo-
cuses on large taxonomic or geographical groups to increase efficiency, and scaling
up small user requests to more manageable units based on taxonomy and geogra-
phy. The prioritisation of specimens within the digitisation programme has been
mainly influenced by RBGE research strategy as well as external projects. This has
resulted in the selection of floristic areas such as SW Asia and the Middle East, as
well as focus taxonomic groups such as Sapotaceae, Zingiberaceae, Begoniaceae
and Gesneriaceae. Funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation through the
Global Plants Initiative enabled us to digitise all the type specimens, which form
another significant part of the collections.
The preparation element (ie taxonomic recuration and specimen & folder prepara-
tion) of the specimen workflow is an important factor which is often under-estimated.
This fundamental curatorial work includes ensuring that the specimens are correctly
filed and that the filing name is legible and clearly visible, as well as ensuring that the
condition of the specimens is assessed and conservation work carried out as required.
96 Elspeth Haston et al. / ZooKeys 209: 93–102 (2012)

The decision to keep the herbarium open and to maintain full access to the speci-
mens as much as possible during the digitisation programme has been necessary due to
the expected duration of the digitisation work given the current funding. In practice, this
has resulted in the specimen workflow for digitisation being affected by many curatorial
and research activities. We have therefore aimed to integrate the workflow and other cu-
ratorial workflows currently in place. An outcome of this integration has been the modi-
fication of some curatorial practices, including loan and destructive sampling procedures.
The digitisation workstations are currently all within the herbarium area to reduce
the amount of movement and to remove the need for freezing specimens on return for
pest control. We have aimed to keep the number of specimens out of the cabinets at
any time to a minimum whilst working with a large enough unit to be efficient.
The inclusion of an assessment of the condition of the specimens and some preser-
vation work has reduced the rate of digitisation. However, this work is critical for the
conservation of the collections and incorporating this work within the digitisation pro-
gramme when the specimens are being handled is allowing us to improve the condition
of the specimens. The assessment of specimen condition can also be collated and used
to inform strategic decisions about the overall management of the collections.
The scope of an individual digitisation project and the arrangement of the speci-
mens within a herbarium has a large impact on the efficiency of the specimen work-
flow. Whilst the most efficient workflow would generally be to work through the col-
lections cabinet by cabinet, this can be difficult to reconcile with digitisation projects
based on a particular collector or country, or with demand-driven digitisation.

The data workflow

The data workflow here includes all elements of capturing and managing data associ-
ated with the specimens, and linking these to the images and image management data.
Logistically, the data associated with biological collections can be divided into three
main categories for digitisation (Haston et al. 2012). Label data which are present on
the specimen; curatorial data which are found on the containers holding the speci-
mens; and supplementary data which are held separately from the collections in in-
dexes, archives and literature. These data types can be captured using different methods
at different stages of the data workflow.
Curatorial data are held separately from the specimen within the collections. At
the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh this generally consists of two pieces of data:
the filing name of the specimen and the broad geographical region from where it was
collected. These represent the classification and location of the specimen within the
collections, providing key information for the physical location and arrangement of
specimens. Some or all of these data may not be present on the specimen itself as la-
bel data. This property means that the most efficient way to capture this data is from
within the collection using information on the folders.
 Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens... 97

Label data are physically associated with the specimen and are generally visible in
the corresponding digital image. This property allows these data to be captured at a
later stage in the overall digitisation workflow. At RBGE, there is a small number of
labels that are obscured by plant material or capsules which are not routinely captured.
Supplementary data such as field notebooks, citations in literature and online re-
sources including Genbank, are independent from the label and curatorial data but can
be used to enrich them.
See Data workflow in Figure 1.
The data workflow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh starts with the capture
of curatorial data. Software written in PHP has been developed in-house to provide a
simple web-based interface for rapid capture of the filing name, geographical region
and barcode assigned to each specimen. The interface is designed around the fact that
at the lowest level specimen storage within the herbarium is arranged into separate
folders for each species within a geographical region. Within the interface users can
select the species and geographical region for the folder and then add the individual
specimens in each folder simply by scanning the barcode on the specimen. A specimen
record is created for each barcode scanned and cross checked against any existing re-
cords in the herbarium database. After validation and error correction the new records
are then batch imported into the herbarium database (BG-BASETM version 6.8). A
similar tool has now been developed within BG-BASETM.
Once the specimen has been imaged, label data can be captured during subsequent
sweeps of data entry. Specimen images are processed through optical character recogni-
tion (OCR) software (ABBYY Recognition Server v. 3.0). At present the resulting text
is stored unparsed as a single data string. This is then searched for recognisable tags
(characters) to allow the creation of subsets of images and specimen records. These
subsets are visually checked to ensure the selection process was correct and then the
relevant data automatically entered. This is currently being carried out for collector and
country. Finally, additional sweeps of label data entry are carried out by operators using
a combination of the images and OCR text.
Within a modular system a level of data entry can be independent from imaging. This
allows the ability to tailor the work being undertaken to the resources available. The use of
minimal data capture methods enables the rapid creation of placeholder records that give
collection managers valuable information about the number of specimens within a taxon
for a particular filing region, and thus act as a catalogue of the collections. These also act
as placeholder records to which images and OCR data can be attached, and which can be
expanded as and when additional resources and technology become available.
The overall workflow is designed to accommodate the different requirements of
the separate projects being undertaken simultaneously in the herbarium. These re-
quirements may vary from full data entry with an image as is usually required for
taxonomic or floristic work, partial data with georeferenced locality which is often all
that is required for biogeographic studies, through to a basic catalogue record with
minimal data for curation purposes. All these requirements can be handled within the
one system. This is of particular importance due to the irregular nature of funding.
98 Elspeth Haston et al. / ZooKeys 209: 93–102 (2012)

Figure 1. Diagrammatic overview of the digitisation workflows at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
(RBGE)

The image workflow

Digitisation projects are resulting in large numbers of high quality images of ap-
proximately 150MB each. The scale of the digitisation programmes is too large
 Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens... 99

for completely manual processes to be used to manage these images. Image work-
flows being developed at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh include image cap-
ture, processing, image management data recording, optical character recognition
(OCR), quality control, image streaming online and archiving. This is carried out
within a system based on image server software written in-house. This software
has been written in Visual Basic and is designed to run as a Windows service. The
software is responsible for marshalling newly scanned images into their ultimate
destinations, registering the new images and all derived versions of that image in
the image database, creating rescaled web viewable versions of each image, tiling
the images to allow web presentation of zoomable versions of the image, submitting
the images for OCR processing and recording the results of the OCR process in the
image database. Multiple instances of the service can be installed in multiple servers
to allow parallel processing of the new images.
See the Image workflow in Figure 1.
Image capture is carried out using two methods, but which feed into the same im-
age workflow system. Epson Expression Model 10000XL scanners at 600dpi, result in
tiff files of approximately 150–200MB each. The Leaf Aptus II-10 56 megapixel digital
backs result in raw files of approximately 100MB from which tiffs of approximately
150MB are created using LeafCapture software. Preliminary quality control checks are
carried out at this stage. These include manually checking the focus and cropping, as
well as ensuring that the tiff file has been sucessfully created.
All images are then saved to a dropbox folder structure. The folder names comprise
basic image management data including the equipment and operator’s name. The im-
age server software continuously polls the dropboxes for new files.
Additional automated quality control checks are carried out at this stage to ensure
that the files are within acceptable size boundaries, that the filename fits a standard pat-
tern, and that an electronic file with the same filename does not already exist.
As they appear, the system records associated image management data, including the
equipment and operator’s name, into an image database. The system then creates fully tiled
image files which are stored in a zip compressed file. The tiles are extracted from the com-
pressed file by the image server software in response to tile requests from the image viewer.
The image viewer is an embedded object contained with the HTML page presented to a
web browser. We currently use Zoomify image viewer software (Zoomify Enterprise TM).
A jpg file of approximately 1MB is also created and made available online. A copy
of the tiff file is transferred to the ABBYY OCR workflow (ABBYY Recognition Server
3.0). Finally, the raw and tiff files are saved to archive folders, to be stored offline on
tape and external hard drive storage. The locations of all these files are recorded within
the image database.
This system has been developed as a modular system which can be extended as
the number of cameras or scanners increase. There has been an emphasis on develop-
ing more automated systems but which can allow an element of user interaction if
required, particularly within the quality control elements.
100 Elspeth Haston et al. / ZooKeys 209: 93–102 (2012)

The decision to capture the images at 600dpi or equivalent was based on pro-
ducing images which contain the same visible information as would be available
through the standard taxonomic tool of a 10× hand lens. This results in very large
images in excess of 150MB which create significant image management problems.
There is currently debate about the need for such high resolution and RBGE has
been involved in these discussions. We have felt the need to maintain this high level
of resolution to ensure that sufficient information is retained, and in the under-
standing that these images can be scaled down in the future but cannot be scaled up.
Deliberately keeping both the raw and the tiff formats increases the demands on
storage. In the rapidly changing environment of image file formats we aim to be inclu-
sive and retain our ability to adapt to future developments.

Discussion
The workflows developed here have been strongly influenced by the presence of differ-
ent funding streams and a diversity of digitisation projects along with the need to cre-
ate a modular and integrated workflow to manage the processes, images and data. This
is in contrast to an alternative digitisation approach such as that seen at the Muséum
national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris which aims to digitise all specimens
within a single project, using a more unified approach.
A single unified structure may reduce the problems inherent in a modular system
in which linking and maintaining links between software developed by different pro-
grammers and residing on different servers can be an issue as versions change over time.
In contrast, a modular approach can potentially benefit more readily from advances
in technology as modules can be added, updated or replaced as they become available.
One of the benefits of the modular system developed at RBGE has been to cre-
ate an integrated but flexible management structure for specimens, data and images,
which reduces the need for individual projects to create their own systems with the
additional time and costs involved.
A second and highly significant benefit of an integrated system is that it helps with
the curation of images and data post capture. It is essential that the on-going curation of
these digital collections is considered as early as possible. The data and images need to be
available and accessible but they also need to be kept up to date (with new determinations
and additional data) and new file and archive formats. Having data in multiple systems,
managed by different projects makes this on-going curation task almost impossible. Hav-
ing them in one system makes this daunting and ever-growing task more achievable.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Andrew W Mellon Founda-
tion and the Scottish Government in funding large digitisation projects at the Royal
 Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens... 101

Botanic Garden Edinburgh. In addition, the authors would like to thank all the staff
who have worked on the digitisation projects at RBGE for their dedication and will-
ingness to explore new methods of digitisation.

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